就像大多数瑞士一样，ChristophMüller从未支付过很多人的高飞银行家的行为。这位40岁的Müller经常在朗登塔尔运行13小时的时间，是横行的一个小镇，位于伯尔尼的首都25英里，他认为大银行至少像他一样易于理念地管理自己他的小企业主人管理了他们的担忧。因此，当巨型瑞银在2008年抵消美国次次证券的损失时，瑞士州亏损亏损，所以需要一个SF43亿纳税人救助，他是可理解的。“在过去，如果一位银行家丢失了这么多钱，他会跳出一个窗口，”Müller说。瑞士人可能不会暴发苏黎世的Paradeplatz以要求对银行家的荒谬，但Müller离他的愤怒远远不已。瑞士国的亏损违反了瑞士大银行及其公民之间的信任，这是一个非凡的发展，银行在银行业务与制表和巧克力一样多的国家身份的一部分。突然间，假设瑞士信贷和瑞士有利于瑞士是不再安全的。金融危机表明，这些大银行的问题 - 其综合资产是国民经济规模的四倍 - 可以压倒政府资源，就像冰岛和爱尔兰的银行爆炸一样。政府和瑞士监管机构已经回应了工业界银行业规则的最激进制力，承诺改变瑞士银行的面孔。 In October, Parliament adopted a law requiring the two big banks to boost their capital to 19 percent of risk-weighted assets, a draconian level that’s nearly twice the 10.5 percent ratio the Basel III capital accord will phase in globally between now and 2019. The Swiss have also gone further than the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in mandating tough new liquidity requirements that will force the banks to hold greater amounts of safe, liquid assets to tide them through any crisis. The so-called Swiss finish of capital and liquidity requirements will impose higher regulatory costs on Credit Suisse and UBS than their global competitors are facing and will hit their investment banking divisions especially hard.
安联全球投资者（Allianz Global Investors）驻法兰克福的金融业分析师奥利弗·弗莱德（Oliver Flade）表示：“很难看到瑞银和瑞士信贷在其当前业务模式下的投资银行业务将如何产生高于资本成本的回报。”。瑞士各大银行目前正努力为新的、严峻的金融时代进行重组。瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）和瑞银（UBS）的业务模式发生了重大变化，它们正在缩减投资银行业务的规模和风险偏好，并将重点放在私人银行业务和财富管理上。这些业务需要更少的资本，银行希望能产生更稳定的回报。去年9月接任瑞银首席执行官的资深投资银行家塞尔吉奥·埃莫蒂（Sergio Ermotti）表示：“对我们来说，最重要的是在财富管理方面成为全球领先者。”。瑞银的裁员规模是巨大的——鉴于其最近的记录，这并不奇怪。该集团的投资银行正在通过数十亿美元的资产出售大幅削减其资产负债表，关闭自营交易台，减少其固定收益账面，放弃固定收益宏观定向交易和资产证券化等业务，并解雇1800名投资银行家。瑞银预计，到2016年底，其投资银行部门的风险加权资产将减少近一半，达到1500亿瑞士法郎。在整个危机期间保持盈利的瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）正在更谨慎地使用这把刀，但即便如此，该行计划在2014年底前将其投资银行部门的风险加权资产削减37%。三年前，该行开始更加重视私人银行业务和财富管理，而该投行最近表现不佳——2011年第四季度税前亏损13亿瑞士法郎，而去年同期的利润为5.58亿瑞士法郎——可能会加速这一趋势。该投资银行将越来越多地寻求“利用与私人银行和资产管理业务的协同效应”，董事长乌尔斯·罗纳（Urs Rohner）和首席执行官布雷迪·杜根（Brady Dougan）上个月在致股东的信中写道，宣布该集团2011年的业绩。两家公司都声称，在新体制下，它们的投资银行业务将有利可图。瑞银的目标是到2016年实现12%至17%的税前股本回报，瑞士信贷预计到2016年实现15%的税前回报。但许多观察家怀疑，在如此大幅的紧缩之后，银行能否有效竞争，并获得可观的回报。到2016年，瑞银投资银行使用的资本将是德意志银行和巴克莱资本可比水平的65%，而瑞士信贷的数字将只有60%。“没有其他投资银行有意将其规模缩小到瑞银计划的程度，”麦迪奥班卡驻伦敦银行业分析师克里斯托弗·惠勒（Christopher Wheeler）表示。“这是一片未知的领域。”惠勒补充道，瑞士信贷正在更巧妙地调整航向，但“它也正在成为投资银行业的第二梯队。”平心而论，全世界的投资银行都在进行大量裁员。不确定的全球经济前景导致了并购和首次公开发行股票等收费活动的减少，而更严格的监管约束正在挤压其他业务，特别是曾经利润丰厚的固定收益、货币和商品交易市场（FICC）。据高盛集团（Goldman Sachs Group）估计，去年各大投资银行的FICC和股票收入下降了24%。高盛去年裁员2400人，占其工资总额的6.7%，此前其股本回报率跌至3.7%。花旗集团宣布裁员4500人的计划，摩根斯坦利将下降1600个槽，英国皇家银行苏格兰集团正在裁员3500人（见故事，第32页），法国兴业银行（SociétéGénérale）表示，其投资银行将缩减规模，专注于欧洲核心客户，而不是在全球范围内与大型企业竞争。然而，由于瑞士严格的新监管要求，瑞士信贷和瑞银未来将面临比竞争对手更严峻的阻力。因此，两家银行都在寻找适合自己的投资银行，主要为私人银行客户提供产品和服务。两家银行的一个关键焦点将是超高净值个人，即资产超过1亿美元的富有客户。“毫无疑问，这是当今财富管理最具活力的领域，”Solution Partners负责人约翰·扎菲里奥（John Zafiriou）表示。Solution Partners是瑞士信贷私人银行的一个分支，为富裕客户创建投资银行产品。去年的财务业绩突出了向财富管理转变背后的逻辑。瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）去年净收入暴跌61%，至20亿瑞士法郎，而收入则下降了17%。瑞士信贷从全球金融危机中恢复过来，状况比大多数主要银行都好o Sf25.4 billion. Private banking, which includes wealth management, generated 42.8 percent of group revenue and 85.4 percent of pretax profits, while the investment bank contributed 45.2 percent of revenue and just 2.9 percent of pretax profits, or Sf79 million. The bank’s wealth management business pulled in Sf37.8 billion in net new money from clients. At UBS net income plunged 43.8 percent in 2011, to Sf4.23 billion, largely because of poor performance by the investment banking division. That unit posted a pretax loss of Sf1.23 billion, compared with a profit of Sf2.75 billion in 2010. By contrast, the bank’s wealth management division posted a 15.9 percent rise in pretax profits, to Sf2.7 billion, and attracted Sf23.5 billion in net new money from clients. Wealth Management Americas, which reports as a separate unit, had pretax profits of Sf504 million and gained Sf12.1 billion in net new money. UBS doesn’t break out the results of its private banking business. The shifting strategies of the big banks seem to be welcomed by shareholders, particularly in Switzerland. “UBS and Credit Suisse are trying to become the institutions they were in the 1980s and 1990s, when they had much smaller investment banks — and that’s what they should do,” says Martin Janssen, the Zurich-based chief executive of Ecofin Research and Consulting, which offers investment advice to the leading Swiss pension funds. Other analysts dismiss the idea of going back to some golden era of low-risk, high-return business of catering to the rich. “Banking was never riskless in Switzerland, and it never consisted purely of wealth management,” says Manuel Ammann, director of the Swiss Institute of Banking and Finance at the University of St. Gallen. He points to the so-called Chiasso affair of 1977, in which Credit Suisse lost some Sf3 billion — equivalent at the time to almost its entire capital — in a startling episode of fraud involving one of its bankers, who engaged in illegal dealings with Italian tax evaders. In the 1990s the bursting of a national housing bubble caused big mortgage losses to banks big and small. But neither of those episodes caused the kind of political uproar that the UBS troubles did, or required the government to intervene on such a dramatic scale. UBS'S MASSIVE LOSSES BROUGHT TO A BITTER END more than a decade of efforts to break into the bulge bracket of global investment banks. Swiss Bank Corp., which would merge with Union Bank of Switzerland to create UBS in the late 1990s, acquired fabled U.K. merchant bank S.G. Warburg & Co. in 1995 to gain a foothold in the lucrative London market. Five years later UBS paid $10.8 billion to buy Paine Webber Group and expand its investment banking and wealth management businesses in the U.S. The strategy worked for a time. At its apex in 2007, UBS ranked sixth among investment banks, with a 5.4 percent share of the global fee pool, according to data provider Dealogic. It boasted the leading franchise in European equities and reigned supreme as the largest investment bank in Asia. But UBS’s efforts to build a leading fixed-income business proved disastrous. Extravagant bets on U.S. subprime mortgages and other toxic assets went awry when the housing market turned down, forcing UBS to take more than $50 billion in credit write-downs, more than any other bank. In a rush to reduce its exposure, the bank lopped a trillion francs off its balance sheet over the next four years, reducing total assets to Sf1.42 trillion by the end of 2011. Credit Suisse has slimmed down to Sf1.05 trillion in assets from its precrisis level of Sf1.36 trillion. At the same time that UBS was struggling to shed bad assets, the bank faced the threat of being banned from doing business in the U.S. because of its efforts to help wealthy Americans evade taxes with secret Swiss bank accounts. UBS seemed to regain its footing when former Credit Suisse CEO Oswald Grübel was lured out of retirement to take the reins in 2009. He promised to restore a balance between wealth management and investment banking at UBS. He also moved quickly to settle the spat with the U.S. government, which ended up imposing $780 million in fines on UBS and getting the names of more than 4,500 UBS accountholders in the U.S. But soon UBS stumbled yet again. An executive on its London-based equity desk, Kweku Adoboli, was arrested last September and charged with making unauthorized trades that had led to $2.3 billion in losses at the bank. The scandal forced Grübel to resign nine days later. He was replaced by Ermotti, a Swiss national and longtime investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co. who had joined UBS from UniCredit in early 2011 to head up the bank’s European business. By then the regulatory vise was tightening around the two big banks. Shaken by the near-collapse of UBS in 2008, the Swiss in 2009 created a Commission of Experts for limiting the economic risks posed by large banks. Better known as the “too big to fail” commission, it included representatives from the Finance ministry, the Swiss National Bank, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma), academia and the private sector, most notably UBS and Credit Suisse. The panel’s main goal was to ensure that Switzerland avoided the plight of Iceland and Ireland, where banking sector collapses pushed the governments to the brink of default. “I don’t think you can compare the Swiss situation to Iceland or Ireland,” says Oscar Knapp, head of the market division at the State Secretariat for International Financial Matters at the Finance ministry, who has been closely involved in crafting the bank reforms. “But our package of measures is intended to prevent the difficulties of a major bank from endangering the entire economy.” Finma, the Swiss financial regulator, is the main government agency charged with enforcing stricter capital and liquidity standards. Housed above a dress shop on a narrow, winding street a block away from Paradeplatz, Zurich’s central square, which is dominated by the offices of UBS and Credit Suisse, Finma is notably lean and nimble compared with most European and U.S. regulators. The agency’s banking division is led by Mark Branson, a 42-year-old Briton who previously headed UBS’s wealth management unit. In that role he was obliged to apologize at a 2009 U.S. Senate hearing for UBS breaches of U.S. law in helping Americans to evade taxes. He resigned from the bank to join Finma in January 2010. Today he presides over a modest staff of 100 at the agency, a far cry from the 38,000 employees he oversaw at UBS. Finma runs on a modest annual budget of Sf90.1 million, a figure eclipsed by the assets of many of his former clients at UBS. Branson and his team take a pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to regulating the banks. “We don’t have thousands of pages of regulations,” he says. “And in terms of speed of implementation of reforms, once we identify a gap in the existing regulations, we do try to fix it as quickly as possible.” He notes that Finma ordered Credit Suisse and UBS to apply Basel’s stringent new capital rules for securities trading operations, a key first response to the financial crisis, one year ahead of schedule, in 2010. The Swiss banks have been similarly ahead of the curve in applying new liquidity regulations mandating that banks hold a higher percentage of safe, liquid assets such as government bonds to ride out any financial panic. Basel III calls for international banks to meet the new liquidity standards by 2015, but Finma has been applying the standard since June 2010, requiring UBS and Credit Suisse to hold enough high-quality liquid assets to cover an estimated 30 days’ worth of funds outflows in a crisis scenario. Executives at UBS and Credit Suisse grumble about having higher regulatory costs than their rivals, but they do enjoy some benefits as a result. “CDS spreads for the Swiss banks are well below most of their peer group,” says Andreas Venditti, Zurich-based banking analyst for Zürcher Kantonalbank. “The market sees them as less risky. And they have the Swiss regulators to thank.” Late last month credit default swaps on UBS debt were trading at 166 basis points, meaning that it cost $166,000 to insure $10 million worth of UBS debt for five years, according to financial information company Markit Group. Credit Suisse’s CDSs were quoted at 146 basis points. Among European banks, only Deutsche Bank (160 basis points) and Barclays (175) had similarly low CDS rates. Société Générale was at 271 basis points, Banco Santander at 281 and UniCredit at 341. The Swiss banks also enjoy low funding costs thanks to their strong capitalization, extensive domestic retail operations — the two banks control more than 50 percent of Swiss retail bank deposits — and large deposit base from global wealth management clients. In January, UBS issued €1.5 billion ($2.0 billion) of four-year, 3.125 percent bonds priced to yield 175 basis points more than comparable Swiss government paper. By comparison, Deutsche Bank paid a spread of 180 basis points over U.S. Treasuries to sell $800 million worth of four-year bonds last month. Besides the “too big to fail” threat, the other great systemic issue facing Swiss banks has been the controversial one of tax evasion. The UBS settlement with U.S. tax authorities in 2009 turned out to be only the opening salvo in a battle that has spread to Europe. Last year the Internal Revenue Service accused 11 more Swiss banks, including Credit Suisse, of helping U.S. citizens to avoid taxes through secret accounts. Credit Suisse has informed some of its U.S. clients that it will turn their names over to the IRS. The bank has set aside Sf295 million in reserves to help cover a potential settlement with Washington. Meanwhile, Wegelin & Co., a 270-year-old firm that is Switzerland’s oldest private bank, was indicted on February 2 in New York on federal charges of having hidden more than $1.2 billion for U.S. clients fleeing UBS. Anticipating the indictment, Wegelin announced on January 27 that it had agreed to sell most of its business, with Sf21 billion of client assets, to Raiffeisen Schweiz Genossenschaft, the Swiss cooperative bank, for an undisclosed sum. Although neither Washington nor Bern has disclosed the full list of banks in the IRS crosshairs, they also include Julius Baer Group and Zürcher Kantonalbank. The Swiss government has appointed Knapp, who served as a diplomat before joining the Finance ministry, to negotiate a settlement between the banks and the U.S. tax authorities. “For decades we did not have a strategy to deal with untaxed money from abroad, and some abuses certainly happened,” says Knapp. “And now it is difficult to convince people that our policies have really changed, that we don’t want any undeclared money coming into the country.” Dealing with undeclared money already in Switzerland continues to test the government’s credibility. According to Boston Consulting Group, Swiss banks hold more than $2 trillion in offshore accounts. The amounts that are the subject of hard-fought negotiation between Switzerland and foreign governments are a small fraction of this total. The Swiss banks have given the U.S. Justice Department encrypted data about bank executives and the U.S. clients they serviced, but they have refused to supply the decryption codes until an agreement is reached that would waive criminal prosecution of the banks. Bern has taken a different tack in Europe. Last year Switzerland reached agreements with Germany and the U.K. under which income from undeclared Swiss accounts held by citizens of those countries will be taxed at mutually agreed-upon rates. These foreign clients will pay penalties for failing to pay taxes on previous earnings from their Swiss bank accounts. The accounts will then be considered legal by German and U.K. tax authorities, and the clients will remain anonymous.
安联全球投资者（Allianz Global Investors）驻法兰克福的金融业分析师奥利弗·弗莱德（Oliver Flade）表示：“很难看到瑞银和瑞士信贷在其当前业务模式下的投资银行业务将如何产生高于资本成本的回报。”。瑞士各大银行目前正努力为新的、严峻的金融时代进行重组。瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）和瑞银（UBS）的业务模式发生了重大变化，它们正在缩减投资银行业务的规模和风险偏好，并将重点放在私人银行业务和财富管理上。这些业务需要更少的资本，银行希望能产生更稳定的回报。去年9月接任瑞银首席执行官的资深投资银行家塞尔吉奥·埃莫蒂（Sergio Ermotti）表示：“对我们来说，最重要的是在财富管理方面成为全球领先者。”。瑞银的裁员规模是巨大的——鉴于其最近的记录，这并不奇怪。该集团的投资银行正在通过数十亿美元的资产出售大幅削减其资产负债表，关闭自营交易台，减少其固定收益账面，放弃固定收益宏观定向交易和资产证券化等业务，并解雇1800名投资银行家。瑞银预计，到2016年底，其投资银行部门的风险加权资产将减少近一半，达到1500亿瑞士法郎。在整个危机期间保持盈利的瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）正在更谨慎地使用这把刀，但即便如此，该行计划在2014年底前将其投资银行部门的风险加权资产削减37%。三年前，该行开始更加重视私人银行业务和财富管理，而该投行最近表现不佳——2011年第四季度税前亏损13亿瑞士法郎，而去年同期的利润为5.58亿瑞士法郎——可能会加速这一趋势。该投资银行将越来越多地寻求“利用与私人银行和资产管理业务的协同效应”，董事长乌尔斯·罗纳（Urs Rohner）和首席执行官布雷迪·杜根（Brady Dougan）上个月在致股东的信中写道，宣布该集团2011年的业绩。两家公司都声称，在新体制下，它们的投资银行业务将有利可图。瑞银的目标是到2016年实现12%至17%的税前股本回报，瑞士信贷预计到2016年实现15%的税前回报。但许多观察家怀疑，在如此大幅的紧缩之后，银行能否有效竞争，并获得可观的回报。到2016年，瑞银投资银行使用的资本将是德意志银行和巴克莱资本可比水平的65%，而瑞士信贷的数字将只有60%。“没有其他投资银行有意将其规模缩小到瑞银计划的程度，”麦迪奥班卡驻伦敦银行业分析师克里斯托弗·惠勒（Christopher Wheeler）表示。“这是一片未知的领域。”惠勒补充道，瑞士信贷正在更巧妙地调整航向，但“它也正在成为投资银行业的第二梯队。”平心而论，全世界的投资银行都在进行大量裁员。不确定的全球经济前景导致了并购和首次公开发行股票等收费活动的减少，而更严格的监管约束正在挤压其他业务，特别是曾经利润丰厚的固定收益、货币和商品交易市场（FICC）。据高盛集团（Goldman Sachs Group）估计，去年各大投资银行的FICC和股票收入下降了24%。高盛去年裁员2400人，占其工资总额的6.7%，此前其股本回报率跌至3.7%。花旗集团宣布裁员4500人的计划，摩根斯坦利将下降1600个槽，英国皇家银行苏格兰集团正在裁员3500人（见故事，第32页），法国兴业银行（SociétéGénérale）表示，其投资银行将缩减规模，专注于欧洲核心客户，而不是在全球范围内与大型企业竞争。然而，由于瑞士严格的新监管要求，瑞士信贷和瑞银未来将面临比竞争对手更严峻的阻力。因此，两家银行都在寻找适合自己的投资银行，主要为私人银行客户提供产品和服务。两家银行的一个关键焦点将是超高净值个人，即资产超过1亿美元的富有客户。“毫无疑问，这是当今财富管理最具活力的领域，”Solution Partners负责人约翰·扎菲里奥（John Zafiriou）表示。Solution Partners是瑞士信贷私人银行的一个分支，为富裕客户创建投资银行产品。去年的财务业绩突出了向财富管理转变背后的逻辑。瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）去年净收入暴跌61%，至20亿瑞士法郎，而收入则下降了17%。瑞士信贷从全球金融危机中恢复过来，状况比大多数主要银行都好o Sf25.4 billion. Private banking, which includes wealth management, generated 42.8 percent of group revenue and 85.4 percent of pretax profits, while the investment bank contributed 45.2 percent of revenue and just 2.9 percent of pretax profits, or Sf79 million. The bank’s wealth management business pulled in Sf37.8 billion in net new money from clients. At UBS net income plunged 43.8 percent in 2011, to Sf4.23 billion, largely because of poor performance by the investment banking division. That unit posted a pretax loss of Sf1.23 billion, compared with a profit of Sf2.75 billion in 2010. By contrast, the bank’s wealth management division posted a 15.9 percent rise in pretax profits, to Sf2.7 billion, and attracted Sf23.5 billion in net new money from clients. Wealth Management Americas, which reports as a separate unit, had pretax profits of Sf504 million and gained Sf12.1 billion in net new money. UBS doesn’t break out the results of its private banking business. The shifting strategies of the big banks seem to be welcomed by shareholders, particularly in Switzerland. “UBS and Credit Suisse are trying to become the institutions they were in the 1980s and 1990s, when they had much smaller investment banks — and that’s what they should do,” says Martin Janssen, the Zurich-based chief executive of Ecofin Research and Consulting, which offers investment advice to the leading Swiss pension funds. Other analysts dismiss the idea of going back to some golden era of low-risk, high-return business of catering to the rich. “Banking was never riskless in Switzerland, and it never consisted purely of wealth management,” says Manuel Ammann, director of the Swiss Institute of Banking and Finance at the University of St. Gallen. He points to the so-called Chiasso affair of 1977, in which Credit Suisse lost some Sf3 billion — equivalent at the time to almost its entire capital — in a startling episode of fraud involving one of its bankers, who engaged in illegal dealings with Italian tax evaders. In the 1990s the bursting of a national housing bubble caused big mortgage losses to banks big and small. But neither of those episodes caused the kind of political uproar that the UBS troubles did, or required the government to intervene on such a dramatic scale. UBS'S MASSIVE LOSSES BROUGHT TO A BITTER END more than a decade of efforts to break into the bulge bracket of global investment banks. Swiss Bank Corp., which would merge with Union Bank of Switzerland to create UBS in the late 1990s, acquired fabled U.K. merchant bank S.G. Warburg & Co. in 1995 to gain a foothold in the lucrative London market. Five years later UBS paid $10.8 billion to buy Paine Webber Group and expand its investment banking and wealth management businesses in the U.S. The strategy worked for a time. At its apex in 2007, UBS ranked sixth among investment banks, with a 5.4 percent share of the global fee pool, according to data provider Dealogic. It boasted the leading franchise in European equities and reigned supreme as the largest investment bank in Asia. But UBS’s efforts to build a leading fixed-income business proved disastrous. Extravagant bets on U.S. subprime mortgages and other toxic assets went awry when the housing market turned down, forcing UBS to take more than $50 billion in credit write-downs, more than any other bank. In a rush to reduce its exposure, the bank lopped a trillion francs off its balance sheet over the next four years, reducing total assets to Sf1.42 trillion by the end of 2011. Credit Suisse has slimmed down to Sf1.05 trillion in assets from its precrisis level of Sf1.36 trillion. At the same time that UBS was struggling to shed bad assets, the bank faced the threat of being banned from doing business in the U.S. because of its efforts to help wealthy Americans evade taxes with secret Swiss bank accounts. UBS seemed to regain its footing when former Credit Suisse CEO Oswald Grübel was lured out of retirement to take the reins in 2009. He promised to restore a balance between wealth management and investment banking at UBS. He also moved quickly to settle the spat with the U.S. government, which ended up imposing $780 million in fines on UBS and getting the names of more than 4,500 UBS accountholders in the U.S. But soon UBS stumbled yet again. An executive on its London-based equity desk, Kweku Adoboli, was arrested last September and charged with making unauthorized trades that had led to $2.3 billion in losses at the bank. The scandal forced Grübel to resign nine days later. He was replaced by Ermotti, a Swiss national and longtime investment banker at Merrill Lynch & Co. who had joined UBS from UniCredit in early 2011 to head up the bank’s European business. By then the regulatory vise was tightening around the two big banks. Shaken by the near-collapse of UBS in 2008, the Swiss in 2009 created a Commission of Experts for limiting the economic risks posed by large banks. Better known as the “too big to fail” commission, it included representatives from the Finance ministry, the Swiss National Bank, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma), academia and the private sector, most notably UBS and Credit Suisse. The panel’s main goal was to ensure that Switzerland avoided the plight of Iceland and Ireland, where banking sector collapses pushed the governments to the brink of default. “I don’t think you can compare the Swiss situation to Iceland or Ireland,” says Oscar Knapp, head of the market division at the State Secretariat for International Financial Matters at the Finance ministry, who has been closely involved in crafting the bank reforms. “But our package of measures is intended to prevent the difficulties of a major bank from endangering the entire economy.” Finma, the Swiss financial regulator, is the main government agency charged with enforcing stricter capital and liquidity standards. Housed above a dress shop on a narrow, winding street a block away from Paradeplatz, Zurich’s central square, which is dominated by the offices of UBS and Credit Suisse, Finma is notably lean and nimble compared with most European and U.S. regulators. The agency’s banking division is led by Mark Branson, a 42-year-old Briton who previously headed UBS’s wealth management unit. In that role he was obliged to apologize at a 2009 U.S. Senate hearing for UBS breaches of U.S. law in helping Americans to evade taxes. He resigned from the bank to join Finma in January 2010. Today he presides over a modest staff of 100 at the agency, a far cry from the 38,000 employees he oversaw at UBS. Finma runs on a modest annual budget of Sf90.1 million, a figure eclipsed by the assets of many of his former clients at UBS. Branson and his team take a pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to regulating the banks. “We don’t have thousands of pages of regulations,” he says. “And in terms of speed of implementation of reforms, once we identify a gap in the existing regulations, we do try to fix it as quickly as possible.” He notes that Finma ordered Credit Suisse and UBS to apply Basel’s stringent new capital rules for securities trading operations, a key first response to the financial crisis, one year ahead of schedule, in 2010. The Swiss banks have been similarly ahead of the curve in applying new liquidity regulations mandating that banks hold a higher percentage of safe, liquid assets such as government bonds to ride out any financial panic. Basel III calls for international banks to meet the new liquidity standards by 2015, but Finma has been applying the standard since June 2010, requiring UBS and Credit Suisse to hold enough high-quality liquid assets to cover an estimated 30 days’ worth of funds outflows in a crisis scenario. Executives at UBS and Credit Suisse grumble about having higher regulatory costs than their rivals, but they do enjoy some benefits as a result. “CDS spreads for the Swiss banks are well below most of their peer group,” says Andreas Venditti, Zurich-based banking analyst for Zürcher Kantonalbank. “The market sees them as less risky. And they have the Swiss regulators to thank.” Late last month credit default swaps on UBS debt were trading at 166 basis points, meaning that it cost $166,000 to insure $10 million worth of UBS debt for five years, according to financial information company Markit Group. Credit Suisse’s CDSs were quoted at 146 basis points. Among European banks, only Deutsche Bank (160 basis points) and Barclays (175) had similarly low CDS rates. Société Générale was at 271 basis points, Banco Santander at 281 and UniCredit at 341. The Swiss banks also enjoy low funding costs thanks to their strong capitalization, extensive domestic retail operations — the two banks control more than 50 percent of Swiss retail bank deposits — and large deposit base from global wealth management clients. In January, UBS issued €1.5 billion ($2.0 billion) of four-year, 3.125 percent bonds priced to yield 175 basis points more than comparable Swiss government paper. By comparison, Deutsche Bank paid a spread of 180 basis points over U.S. Treasuries to sell $800 million worth of four-year bonds last month. Besides the “too big to fail” threat, the other great systemic issue facing Swiss banks has been the controversial one of tax evasion. The UBS settlement with U.S. tax authorities in 2009 turned out to be only the opening salvo in a battle that has spread to Europe. Last year the Internal Revenue Service accused 11 more Swiss banks, including Credit Suisse, of helping U.S. citizens to avoid taxes through secret accounts. Credit Suisse has informed some of its U.S. clients that it will turn their names over to the IRS. The bank has set aside Sf295 million in reserves to help cover a potential settlement with Washington. Meanwhile, Wegelin & Co., a 270-year-old firm that is Switzerland’s oldest private bank, was indicted on February 2 in New York on federal charges of having hidden more than $1.2 billion for U.S. clients fleeing UBS. Anticipating the indictment, Wegelin announced on January 27 that it had agreed to sell most of its business, with Sf21 billion of client assets, to Raiffeisen Schweiz Genossenschaft, the Swiss cooperative bank, for an undisclosed sum. Although neither Washington nor Bern has disclosed the full list of banks in the IRS crosshairs, they also include Julius Baer Group and Zürcher Kantonalbank. The Swiss government has appointed Knapp, who served as a diplomat before joining the Finance ministry, to negotiate a settlement between the banks and the U.S. tax authorities. “For decades we did not have a strategy to deal with untaxed money from abroad, and some abuses certainly happened,” says Knapp. “And now it is difficult to convince people that our policies have really changed, that we don’t want any undeclared money coming into the country.” Dealing with undeclared money already in Switzerland continues to test the government’s credibility. According to Boston Consulting Group, Swiss banks hold more than $2 trillion in offshore accounts. The amounts that are the subject of hard-fought negotiation between Switzerland and foreign governments are a small fraction of this total. The Swiss banks have given the U.S. Justice Department encrypted data about bank executives and the U.S. clients they serviced, but they have refused to supply the decryption codes until an agreement is reached that would waive criminal prosecution of the banks. Bern has taken a different tack in Europe. Last year Switzerland reached agreements with Germany and the U.K. under which income from undeclared Swiss accounts held by citizens of those countries will be taxed at mutually agreed-upon rates. These foreign clients will pay penalties for failing to pay taxes on previous earnings from their Swiss bank accounts. The accounts will then be considered legal by German and U.K. tax authorities, and the clients will remain anonymous.尚待克服的一个障碍是欧盟税务专员Algirdas Šemeta的反对意见，他认为这些协议对逃税者来说太慷慨了。但瑞士在这场特殊的小冲突中却袖手旁观。“这是这些国家和布鲁塞尔之间的问题，”纳普说。
银行日益严重的金融问题引发了普通瑞士选民的愤怒，这一因素助长了国家严厉的监管取缔。对银行家的敌意已经成为一种世界性的现象，但在瑞士这个银行业的同义词中，这种敌意尤为显著。“这是我们身份的一部分，”伯尔尼大学的政治学家Suzanne Sch•萨夫说。左翼社会民主党和绿党以及右翼民族主义瑞士人民党（Swiss People’s Party）去年组成了一个不大可能的议会联盟，试图迫使瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）和瑞银（UBS）将其投资银行部门从私人和商业银行业务中剥离出来，但以微弱优势失败。草根阶层的叫嚣迫使中间派政客对银行采取更强硬的立场。中右翼自由民主党下议院议员、银行业问题专家鲁迪·诺瑟（Rüdi Noser）满怀渴望地回忆说，直到几年前，金融问题还很少困扰他位于苏黎世以东30分钟车程的阿尔卑斯山麓小选区的选民。“很少有选民知道AAA评级是什么，”他说。“现在每个人都这样做了。危机扩大了人们的词汇量，并将各种金融问题带到了政治舞台上。”最近涉及前瑞士国民银行主席菲利普·希尔德布兰德的争议再次激起了公众舆论。希尔德布兰德（Hildebrand）作为巴塞尔金融稳定委员会（Financial Stability Board）副主席，曾支持瑞士完成严格的银行资本规则，并在制定更严格的全球监管方面发挥了关键作用。希尔德布兰德还努力抵制瑞士法郎的升值压力，以防止该国出口商因定价过高而退出全球市场。但据披露，他的妻子Kashya去年8月在一笔外汇交易中购买了50.4万美元——就在她丈夫改变瑞士央行政策并设定欧元兑1.20法郎的新上限前几天——引发了强烈抗议。Kashya曾是一名外汇交易员，上世纪90年代在纽约的对冲基金公司Moore Capital Management工作时与希尔德布兰德见过面。她说，她认为法郎估值过高，并采取了自己的行动，但在希尔德布兰德的政策举措导致瑞郎贬值后，她通过将资金转换回瑞郎获得了15%的利润。尽管希尔德布兰德否认有任何不当行为，但他屈服于公众压力，于1月初辞职。“信誉是央行行长最宝贵的资产，”他在解释辞职原因时表示。兰根塔尔小企业主穆勒（Müller）表示：“我想我是一个非常好的央行行长。”“他本应该是一个好人——他推动了所有的银行业改革。”。“但事实证明，他是一个典型的银行家，参与了私人交易。”希尔德布兰德的争议暂时将注意力从丑闻频发的瑞银身上移开，但瑞银一直在努力纠正自己。它正在推行一项战略政策转变，这将大大减少其投资银行的资本配置。裁员可能会破坏已经削弱的特许经营权。Dealogic的数据显示，瑞银已从危机前的排名下降了三位，在去年的全球排行榜上排名第九，投资银行业务收入23.4亿美元，或市场份额的3.3%。这还不到市场领头羊摩根大通（JPMorgan Chase&Co.）的一半，后者拥有56.6亿美元的收入和8.1%的份额。近年来，瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）和德意志银行（Deutsche Bank）已超越瑞银（UBS），分别于去年以5.1%的市场份额升至第五和第六位，而巴克莱资本（Barclays Capital）则以3.9%的市场份额遥遥领先瑞银（UBS），位列第八。Dealogic的数据显示，去年在全球债务资本市场，瑞银排名第六，在2535亿美元的交易中担任账簿管理人。这远远超过排名第十的瑞士信贷2281亿美元，但远远落后于市场领头羊摩根大通的3878亿美元。瑞银在股票资本市场排名第八，交易额为5.77亿美元，远低于排名第五的瑞士信贷8.62亿美元和排名第一的摩根士丹利11.3亿美元。在蓬勃发展的亚太市场，瑞银连续八年成为收入最高的投资银行，失去了它的位置。该行去年以5.01亿美元的收入排名第二，仅次于新的市场领导者瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）的5.05亿美元，但领先于高盛（4.86亿美元）和德意志银行（3.72亿美元）。在过去两年中，瑞银失去了几位主要的亚洲银行家。瑞银中国投资银行业务主管亨利·蔡（Henry Cai）于2010年调任德意志银行（Deutsche bank），领导其在中国的企业和投资银行业务，而瑞银全球资本市场主管马修·科德（Matthew Koder）则于去年被美国银行美林（bank of America Merrill Lynch）挖走，负责监管亚太地区的全球企业投资银行业务。如果瑞银达到2016年的目标capital it deploys in its investment bank will be 70 percent lower than that of JPMorgan Chase. Investment banking will take the brunt of the 3,500 job cuts announced by UBS last July. Employment at the investment bank will drop from 17,900 at the end of September to 16,100 by the end of 2012. For UBS as a whole, the total payroll will drop from 65,921 at the end of September to 62,420 by the end of 2012. At Credit Suisse investment banking will also take the vast majority of the 3,500 job cuts that began in the second half of last year. This will leave the investment bank with 18,300 employees at the end of 2012, down from 21,500 last September. Shareholders applaud the cutbacks at UBS but caution that only continued vigilance will keep the bank on its new path. “You now have that kind of pressure after the rogue trading scandal and Grübel’s resignation,” says Allianz’s Flade. The biggest reductions at UBS will come from the fixed-income, currencies and commodities unit, long considered the heart of any investment bank. “You cannot run a global bank without something as basic as fixed-income trading,” Grübel told Institutional Investor just a year ago, when he was still CEO. In a sign of that importance, the bank currently devotes Sf85 billion of capital to FICC macro directional trading. Nonetheless, over the next two years it will slash that capital by 53 percent, and it plans to exit the business entirely by the end of 2016. The bank also plans to reduce the Sf20 billion of capital backing FICC emerging-markets activity by 25 percent. In equities the bank is cutting its Sf27 billion of capital by 11 percent, largely by eliminating proprietary trading. By comparison, during the same period Credit Suisse is targeting a 61 percent reduction in its Sf66 billion of capital allocated to FICC macro and an 8 percent drop in its Sf21 billion of capital for FICC emerging markets, but it plans no reduction of the Sf31 billion of capital allocated to its equity platform. In announcing its cutbacks, UBS disclosed that 31 of the 80 business lines in its investment bank showed negative returns in the first three quarters of last year. Yet the bank is closing only four of those businesses: FICC macro, FICC asset securitization, FICC complex structured products and equity proprietary trading. Six other lines — four of them involving FICC and two in equities — will be reduced. Carsten Kengeter, head of UBS’s investment bank, says the bank is retaining most of its activities, albeit on a reduced scale, to meet the needs of its ultra-high-net-worth private banking customers. “If we exited all losing business lines, our ultra-high-net-worth clients would find our products and services less attractive and end up moving over to competitors,” he explains. Kengeter cites prime brokerage as an example of a time-consuming, expensive business line that is being retained because institutional investors, hedge funds and family offices demand it. Equity capital markets is another loss maker that UBS is keeping, because it allows U.S. wealth management clients to participate in IPOs. Though IPOs were scarce in 2011, the bank hopes they will increase this year, allowing the business line to regain profitability. Last, UBS is retaining business lines like over-the-counter derivatives, which are currently unprofitable because of impending Basel III capital requirements but might be repriced upward over time. “We don’t want to get out of the business and then have to scramble back into it five years from now,” says Kengeter. While applauding the scope of the investment banking cutbacks, analysts and investors remain cautious about the execution risks. Mediobanca’s Wheeler says UBS has failed to explain clearly to clients how the new strategy will affect them; he adds that the bank must shore up morale in the investment banking departments that it intends to retain and strengthen, and find buyers for the huge volume of risk-weighted assets that almost all global banks are peddling. “Those risks would be on my list of main concerns as well,” concedes Kengeter. “The bottom line is how well we can deliver.” The extensive surgery on the investment bank is intended to improve the performance of wealth management, now clearly the main focus of UBS. “This is the only business for which we have global aspirations of leadership,” says Jürg Zeltner, head of UBS Wealth Management. It is a vision that comforts Swiss investors who believe the two big banks share a competitive advantage over global rivals. “UBS and Credit Suisse are still the very best wealth managers in the world,” says pension fund adviser Janssen. “With passive investments they do a marvelous job, offering competitive prices and high quality.” But to keep a step ahead of global rivals, they will have to demonstrate their alpha competence, especially for wealthy Asian clients. After net withdrawals of more than Sf200 billion in 2008–’10, UBS wealth management attracted more than Sf20 billion in net new money last year, mostly from Asia, but with Sf273 billion in invested assets, Europe remains far ahead of the Sf154 billion that originate in Asia. At Credit Suisse, Sf77.6 billion of invested assets originate in Asia, compared with Sf252.7 billion in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Asian private banking clients demand investment bank products for foreign exchange and equity transactions, as well as hedging capabilities and bridge finance for IPOs. Their family offices hire bankers who want access to UBS wealth management research and execution platforms. “If we cannot deliver this direct access, they will go to another bank,” says Zeltner. With the Asian wealth management business rising so fast, some analysts suggest that UBS consider selling its sizable U.S. wealth management operation and using the proceeds to expand in the Far East. But under Robert McCann, UBS Wealth Management Americas recorded Sf501 million in profits before taxes in 2011, compared with a Sf130 million loss the year before. According to CEO Ermotti, the division is well on its way to achieving an annual target of $1 billion in pretax profits by 2016. And UBS’s $895,000 in revenue production per U.S. wealth management adviser is the highest on Wall Street. The progress achieved in the U.S. since the 2009 tax evasion scandal and the financial crisis, says Ermotti, has muted any arguments of shifting UBS resources there to Asia. Besides, if UBS is intent upon global leadership in wealth management, he says, “how can we not be present in the U.S., the world’s biggest market?” It remains to be seen whether the renewed focus on wealth management will soften the hostility of domestic critics toward the big banks. “Hopefully, the public will understand that banks aren’t all evil and that they are trying to manage themselves in good conscience and to the benefit of their shareholders, customers and communities,” says UBS’s Kengeter.兰根塔尔公司的老板Müller认为，如今只有较小的州银行和合作银行才值得这样的信任。他说:“我可以从四到五家银行中选择用于我的商业和个人贷款。”但他至少从大银行那里得到了一点好消息。尽管瑞银集团和瑞士信贷在2月份宣布，他们将分别将2011年的总奖金减少40%和41%。瑞银进一步披露，已将投资银行奖金总额较上年减少60%，并将收回超过200万美元的股票奖金的一半。肯格特本人将放弃任何奖金。••